Best known as the English monarch who married six times and executed two of his wives, Henry VIII (1491–1547) cannot be called a particularly pious man. But, almost by accident, the king managed to create the Church of England, which replaced Roman Catholicism as his nation’s official faith.
The third child of King Henry VII (1457–1509), the younger Henry never expected to become king. His older brother, Arthur, was next in line for the throne, but died suddenly in 1502. Henry then inherited both his brother’s title and his widow, the Spanish princess Catherine of Aragon (1485–1536). When Henry VII died, the couple became king and queen of England.
In the early years of the Protestant Reformation, Henry remained a loyal Roman Catholic, more concerned with building England’s navy than with the controversies over religious reform that had erupted in continental Europe. Pope Leo X (1475–1521) even awarded the English king the title Fidei defensor, or Defender of the Faith, after Henry defended the church against Martin Luther.
However, politics and Henry’s troubled marriage to Catherine eventually led him to make a dramatic break with the church. Catherine gave birth to six children, but only one—the future Queen Mary I (1516–1558)—survived infancy. Without a male heir, Henry feared the kingdom would collapse into instability after his death.
Determined to produce a son, Henry asked the pope to grant an annulment so he could marry Anne Boleyn (c. 1507–1536). When the pope refused, Henry defied Rome, declared himself the nation’s top religious authority, and married Boleyn anyway in 1533. (She was beheaded three years later after failing to produce a son.)
Henry’s decision to reject the pope’s authority—a policy the king enforced with a round of executions of papal loyalists in 1535—would have enormous consequences for English politics and religion. The country would be engulfed in religious turmoil for the rest of the century as Catholics and Protestants jostled for power. Henry, however, finally got his wish in 1537, when his third wife, Jane Seymour (1509–1537), gave birth to the future King Edward VI (1537–1553).
ADDITIONAL FACTS
- The abolition of papal authority in England allowed for the first English-language Bible. (Translations had been illegal under Roman Catholicism.)
- After Catherine, Anne Boleyn, and Jane Seymour, Henry’s other three wives were Anne of Cleves (1515–1557), Catherine Howard (c. 1523–1542), and Catherine Parr (1512–1548).
- For the rest of her life, Catherine of Aragon maintained that she was Henry’s rightful wife. But when she died in a castle near Cambridge, Henry ordered his subjects to celebrate the news.
